Technology musings with a twist of user empathy.

How to Set Up the Solarized Color Scheme for Vim and iTerm2

When you stare at a display full of code for hours at a time, a nice looking color scheme is worth the time it takes to set up.

Enter Solarized, a great option for improving your overall text-editing life.

My officemate Kevin has been evangelizing Solarized for a while, so today I took the plunge and set it up, and man do I wish I had done this a while ago. Much of the content described below is straight from his setup - I definitely owe him.

In iTerm2, open “iTerm2 > Preferences > Profiles > Colors”, and click “Load Presets…” to load the Solarized color schemes (light and dark) that are found in the .zip in “solarized/iterm2-colors-solarized/”

For more info see the iTerm2 README from solarized.zip - the path to it in the zip file is:

solarized/iterm2-colors-solarized/README.md

Use these instructions from the pathogen github README to install it - pathogen will be used further down to install solarized.vim and NERDTree: